It’s not the kind of alone time I actually look forward to.

Today She Who Must Be Obeyed and our youngest returned from my in-laws’ house and our oldest disappeared to parts unknown that involved the tickets mentioned in the last couple posts.

This meant it fell on me to return the house to a livable state. Luckily, this didn’t involve much more than washing some dishes, vacuuming, and removing our oldest’s stuff from the living room and dumping the stuff on her desk. (Note: She Who Must Be Obeyed prefer’s to complain about the presence of such stuff in the living room; I tend to prefer to make our oldest complain about the presence of such stuff on her desk.)

Other than that, I didn’t do much. One curse of having a long holiday is the tendency to start enjoying it too much and falling into the habit of doing nothing and that means a lot of time gets wasted.

Fortunately, or unfortunately, because I’m already in the habit of doing nothing, it doesn’t bother me as much as it should.

Please See Update at End of this Post.

Our oldest learned a lesson about internet shopping. Sort of. She Who Must Be Obeyed learned a lesson too. I, as usual, played the part of Cassandra.

Our oldest, thanks to a slush fund from her grandparents, has become the concert ticket purchaser for her group of groupies. She buys the tickets, her friends reimburse her.

This time, though, there were complications. After supposedly being posted on a Friday, the tickets hadn’t arrived by Wednesday and everyone in the house (translation: our oldest and She Who Must Be Obeyed) went into panic mode. Emails were sent and sent again when replies didn’t arrive expeditiously.

I pointed out that Saturday was a national holiday and Sunday didn’t have mail service and this week is Golden Week and that probably slowed things down. I was ignored and a couple rants about the situation ensued, I pointed out that they were stuck in a position where one person had the money and the other person couldn’t prove they hadn’t received the tickets because no one thought to send the tickets registered mail.

As I predicted, the seller claimed our oldest had actually received the tickets and was trying to pull a scam to get her money back. More rants ensued and She Who Must Be Obeyed contacted the post office to elicit help.

Now, apparently, the tickets are supposed to arrive on Saturday for the Sunday concert. I almost hope they don’t, as I suspect the lesson is more important than the arrival of the tickets.

Update: The tickets arrived safe and sound. However, it appears they were mailed not on the Friday, but on the day our oldest and She Who Must Be Obeyed started complaining. Curiouser and curiouser.

Today became an impromptu Daddy/Daughter Day Out when She Who Must Be Obeyed said that our youngest wanted to go see a movie. Somewhere in there Beauty and the Beast was mentioned and I said that would be okay, mostly because it was in English and because movie popcorn would be involved.

This means I may have been the victim of a bait-and-switch.

As I looked up times for the English version of the movie, She Who Must Be Obeyed clarified that our youngest wanted to see the latest Detective Conan movie. This was an issue as the movie is shown in Japanese only. However, I’ve already seen Bakuman and a Pokemon movie in Japanese so I didn’t think this would be an issue.

However, I know absolutely nothing about Detective Conan and found the movie quite boring. A lot of it takes place in meeting rooms with people talking about events past and present. This made it hard to follow. Action scenes are easy to follow, but four people sitting in different rooms discussing the case gets old pretty quick. Also, anime Japanese is much harder to follow than live action Japanese as facial expressions and lip movements are off.

On either side of the movie, I let our youngest play her favorite game. The first time there were no problems but when we arrived after the movie, there was a high school/college aged young man playing the game on one of the machines. As this is a game designed for girls, it was an odd image. Also odd was an older man who kept circling around and through the game center. As he kept making odd noises I figured he might be a little off or might have Tourette’s Syndrome.

Either way, every time he came by to watch our youngest play her game, I positioned myself between him and her. At one point I was in constant motion as he kept moving to find a view. Eventually he left.

After we came back it was time to recover from a diet busting day.

Note: Yesterday’s video monetization issue has been resolved and the videos are once again monetized. I won’t link to them, though, as they suck. Also, it appears I made enough to have two dimes to rub together.

She Who Must Be Obeyed wanted the freezer cleaned out which meant that today I got to cook. Had, to, actually, as I was volunteered with a “You’re cooking gumbo tomorrow, right?”

It all worked out well, though, as I was able to take a slightly different approach. For example, I cut the sausage differently (long story). I also had the joy of starting without all the ingredients in the house. We also had our oldest out doing something, but with instructions to return by 8:30.

This time around I was able to fix my mistakes from the first time around. The roux was better and except for needing more salt, it all tasted good. I also had orders to make it more like curry and less like soup. There was also the issue of there being no onions in the house, which meant I started cooking without all the proper ingredients present.

Now I have to decide if I want to order more sausage from Hokkaido. I probably will, as there are a few things I’d like to try. (More on that in a future post.)